This city has streets, buildings, squares, and shopping centers. Cars and trucks travel its roads every day — yet you'd be hard-pressed to find a single human being there.
Welcome to Ordos.
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Ordos is a Chinese city built around the local coal industry.
Between 2005 and 2011, China's real-estate bubble burst, and in 2012 coal prices plummeted sharply. Construction in the city ground to a halt, and it became a ghost town with a population density of just 25 residents per square kilometer.
In recent years, however, the city has been given a new lease on life — and it now serves as one of the most important testing grounds for the future of transportation.
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The city has been adapted for autonomous vehicles, with various control and monitoring systems added to track the movement of self-driving cars and trucks in real time.
The trucks haul coal from the mines without a human driver, and you can watch them travel one after another in orderly convoys through the city streets to their unloading points.
In this way, the city has effectively become a real-world testing and learning hub, enabling companies developing autonomous driving technology to significantly refine their solutions under actual field conditions.
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Similar testing grounds can be found in the United States and South Korea, but Ordos is unique in being a genuine urban environment — not a military base or training facility converted into a test track.
Its urban yet sparsely populated setting allows the technology to be tested in the field without endangering human lives. The drawback, however, is that it doesn't replicate the extreme scenarios common in dense cities — a child darting into the road, or navigating heavy traffic.
In this context, it's worth thinking about Tesla, whose millions of smart vehicles generate an abundance of invaluable data on navigating every type of road and traffic condition — something that may ultimately prove to be the company's most important and profitable asset.
Pictured: The Ordos Media Center.
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👋 Hi, I'm Shlomo Strauss — follow me for more fascinating content on science and technology.